A fresh start

...let there be spaces in your togetherness
                                                  - Kahlil Gibran

For many teachers and students, today is the first day back to school after a long summer break. It's a week of clean rooms and polished floors, new instructional materials and techniques, unspoiled notebooks and sharp pencils, and, well, new starts on relationshops with our students and our colleagues. One can almost smell the optimism -  a feeling that this will, indeed, be a better year than last.

Our country's long summer break, I was taught, has its roots in our historically agricultural economy. The majority of kids attending school in the U.S. until about 100 years ago were farm kids. And farm kids were expected to help during the summer months on the farm.

And as a farm kid growing up in the 50s and 60s, this was still sort of true. I did "walk beans" and help put up hay in the summer, along with my regular year-round chores that mostly involved some sort of animal waste removal (which served as good experience for so many future tasks.)

There are, as far as I can tell, no agriculture-related reasons to keep the kids home in the summer anymore. Technology has largely replaced manual labor. Genetically modified soy beans don't need to be walked and hay is now stored in huge round bales, not small square ones, and not loaded on racks and stored in mows.

We've all read and experienced the loss of skills some kids experience as a result of not being in school for a couple months. I have argued for year-round schools before.

But I am beginning to think that the long summers are on balance good things. That an extened break is needed for everyone, students and staff alike, to gain some perspective, get a little bored, do a different kind of work, play a little more seriously, and begin to miss each other.

What would happen if each year everyone was required to take a 12 week hiatus from their jobs, their marriages, their parents/children, their churches, their social networks, and their hobbies? Wouldn't we all come back to these relationships with blank notebooks and sharp pencils and optimism and even renewed appreciation?

Welcome back, everyone. May this be your best school year EVER!

Photo of round hay bales Lake Jefferson, MN, 2003.

Revisiting BS Lit and thoughts about bad words

(The bullshitter) does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

Given the current brouhaha surrounding the health care debate, I thought it might be time to brush off an old post, Bullshit Literacy. Or for those of you with scatological avoidance issues, BS Lit. (I like Bullshit Lit because it rhymes*) While ASCD, ISTE or AASL won't admit it, Bullshit Lit is the 21st Century Skill set. Embed these crucial skills in your curriculum today!

The Bullshit Literate Student will (2009):

1. Show no social conscience or balance when deliberately distorting factoids, data, or expert opinion in presenting a conclusion.
2. Skillfully use any medium and all persuasive techniques in order to convince others. This includes the ability to use technology to doctor images and edit published text.
3. Consistently, vociferously, and blindly hold to a single point of view, and know that volume, repetition and rhetoric trump reason.
4. Use purposely emotion-laded words so as not to let reason possibly interfere with judgement.
5. Convincingly fake sincerity and deliver any message with a straight face.
6. Ably disguise personal gain as public good.
7. Take a single incident or news story and follow it to an illogical conclusion.
8. Claim any idea as original.
9. Deny prior knowledge.
10. Create a website, wiki, blog, or podcast. (beginning level). Find a publisher, broadcaster or corporate sponsor for whom the bottom line is the bottom line. (advanced).
11. Never, never, never show doubt.
12. Take no responsibility for consequences that may occur down the road.
13. Use any extreme of any financial projection or estimate.
14. Let the retention of power or position be the deciding factor in all decisions. Doing what's right is for wimps and suckers.
15. Offer apologies in such a way that the wrong-doer looks morally superior.

Other skills the Bullshit Literate need master?

A follow-up post with a link to Art Wolensky's rubric for measuring bullshit literacy attainment.

For Latin readers from http://www.zazzle.com

* I have purposely retained the term bullshit in this set of competencies, acknowledging that it will offend some readers and limit the distribution of this important skill set. However, I cannot think of another, less objectionable term that describes the act of bullshitting, a person who is a bullshitter, or a communication that is bullshit. (No, baloney does not have the gravitas.) I believe that writing "bullsh*t" or just "bull" is disingenuous since the full term pops into the reader's head anyway and simply makes them feel guilty about knowing such words.

I try to use expletives or scatological references only sparingly and purposefully. But in adult conversation they are sometimes necessary, even vital. And during times of stress or excitement, unavoidable.

After having worked some months in construction duirng my college days, I took a job as a stock clerk/delivery person in a large furniture store. My supervisor approached me not long after being hired and said, 'Doug, I don't think you are even aware of it, but did you know you can't say a single sentence without putting a profanity in it?" His comment made me think hard about not whether one uses bad language, but if one can control one's use of it.

A lesson I tried to teach my son the first time I heard him let fly a blue streak.

Thanks for letting me ramble.

Short poems

As things so very often are
intelligence won’t get you far.
So be glad you’ve got more sense
than you’ve got intelligence.

Experts have
their expert fun
ex cathedra
telling one
just how nothing
can be done.

 - Piet Hein

I'll be damned if I can find it again, but a recent blog post included a "grook" (short poem) by Piet Hein - on the order of the ones above. Until having read the now misplaced post, I had nearly forgotten about this wonderful poet. (A short homage is here, much more interesting than the Wikipedia article linked above.)

Hein's little grooks made me think about how our educational system too often values quanity above quality. The 500 word essay. The ten page term paper. All the even problems at the end of chapter seven. Read a book of at least 200 pages. Percent of students passng a test. GPAs and ACT scores.

Counting is probably the simplest and least meaningful type of evaluation of anything.

In the spirit of quality over quantity, I'll end now. But here are a couple other short poems (not Piet Hein's). Feel free to add your own favorites in the comments. Please no limericks beginning, "There once was a hermit named Dave..."

The Rebel
When I
die
I’m sure
I will have a
Big Funeral
Curiosity
seekers
coming to see
if I
am really
Dead
Or just
trying to make
Trouble - Mari Evans

Hide not your talents,
they for use were made.
What’s a Sun-dial
in the Shade? - Benjamin Franklin 

Shake and shake
The catsup bottle,
None will come,
And then a lot’ll. - Richard Armour